


Seas between us

by middlemarch



Category: The Hour
Genre: Divorce, F/M, Marriage, Post-Canon, Reminiscing, Sharing a drink, pint of bitter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-26 11:08:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12556088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: They hadn't kept up with each other. Why would they?





	Seas between us

They met again, ten years later, in a pub Freddie picked out. It was a little dirty, which Camille sensed meant he felt it was authentic, or at least, that would have been his justification ten years ago. Perhaps now, all it meant was that it was close to his office or the Tube station he preferred. Or that the pint he was nursing was better than average, far better than the terrible sour red wine she’d left in front of her after the first sip.

“Bel doesn’t mind this?” she asked. Why not ask any question she wanted? The truth or a lie, either way, she was curious to hear what he’d tell her.

“Why should she?” he replied, not as impatient as he’d been. Still handsome though, more attractive with a bit of grey at the temples, the extra weight he’d finally managed to put on suiting him. His suit was expensive, worn as if it weren’t, and she smiled to herself at what she could notice, whether he would be surprised to learn what she observed. 

“An impromptu meeting with your ex-wife? A former lover? Come now, Freddie, not all women would be so tolerant,” she said.

“Bel doesn’t bother about things like that. She’s not the jealous type,” he said. Camille knew that once everything he said would have had at least two meanings, maybe three, and that he would expect her to glean them all, frustrated if she did not; he concealed frustration with poor grace, especially once an embrace could no longer be a solution.

“She is a paragon, then,” Camille said lightly. She wished she had lit a cigarette but she did not want to fumble with her handbag now; she wanted to watch his face.

“No, she’s—we’ve been through things, something like this, she’s not easily distressed anymore. About us,” he said.

“Us?” Camille repeated. 

“Sorry, I meant, about our relationship, mine and Bel’s, not our marriage,” he explained. “Sorry, Maudie’s been croupy lately, I haven’t slept well in a week.”

“I remember when you could sleep for an hour and critique the morning papers like a lecturer at Cambridge,” she said. She’d stayed in bed, listening to him rant while he dressed, enjoying the feeling of the warm bed linens against her bare skin, then his mouth pressing a kiss to her shoulder, the top of her breast. 

“God, we were so young then, weren’t we?” he exclaimed.

“We were. _Enfants terribles_ , both of us. It seems an age, impossible. Impossible to have been that young, that stupid, that--,” she said.

“Lovely? That hasn’t changed, Camille, you must know that,” he said, trying for gallantry. She burst out laughing and he finally grinned, finally looked like the boy she had married once. The boy she had loved once, with all her heart until she hadn’t, and had known that he had not loved her for much longer than she’d known. That she had been right and wrong about Bel Rowley, right and wrong about returning to England with him. If they had gone to Geneva, or stayed in San Francisco, they might still be married. There might be a Marie-Laure who had the croup and not a Maudie, the glass of wine might taste of cherries and the smoke of a wildfire. She tasted her wine again, grimaced and set it back down.

“Oh, Freddie, you can’t think I asked you to come for that? To be petted and complimented?” she said after she finished laughing, the smile still in her tone.

“Why did you?” he said.

“Because I was curious. Because I was going to be in town for a few days and I could not resist seeing what had become of you. Because I never said goodbye and I never said thank you and I never gave you your ring back,” she said, taking the circlet of cheap diamonds from her pocket and putting it on the sticky table-top.

“You didn’t need to say anything more than you did. You were a better writer than I was then, and I hazard, you still are,” he said, touching her wrist with his forefinger, the lightest touch, fainter than the first kiss he’d given her, before she’d taken his face in her hands and tasted him.

“Keep it,” he added, moving the ring toward her. “Unless you really don’t want it.”

“No,” she answered, finding she spoke the truth. “I’d like to keep it. To remember, I was so young once and so were you.”

He smiled then, the expression one she recognized. One she had never seen before. One she thought Bel would not know, could not. It was what was left of their marriage and it was small and rich and tender in a way she could never regret. She had never regretted marrying Freddie and she had never regretted leaving him. She wouldn’t say that though. He was enough the same to be hurt by it and she found she had no thirst for that.

**Author's Note:**

> There was a discussion on Tumblr about whether Camille was mostly just a plot device for Bel and Freddie's relationship and this was my indirect response. The title is from Robert Burns's classic "Auld Lang Syne."


End file.
